Share

Microsoft, Yahoo Among Open Source 'Rookies of the Year'

Mojito- a drink and a JavaScript MVC framework for mobile and Web applications running on client and server from Yahoo!

Photo: Alex Washburn / Wired

Each year, Black Duck unveils what it calls the Rookie Open Source Projects of the Year. The Massachusetts company sells software for managing open source projects, and its annual list is a way of promoting both itself and the wider open source software community. But the list is also good reading.

This year, Microsoft made a surprise appearance, as did Yahoo, which fell down a bit in terms of developer relations last year, thanks to heavy layoffs and its widely panned patents policy.

Black Duck maintains extensive statistics on open source projects, running a site called Ohloh, which tracks the activity and popularity of just about every open source project the company can find. According to Black Duck, the Rookie of the Year projects were chosen based on a simple weighted scoring system that factored in "project activity, commits pace, project team attributes, and other factors." Each project was introduced in 2012.

Syte –simple but powerful packaged personal site that has social integrations like Twitter, GitHub, Tumblr, WordPress, Stack Overflow and more.

Twitter Bower – a package manager for the web that lets you easily install assets such as images, CSS, JS and manages dependencies for you.

TypeScript – a language for application-scale JavaScript development, providing a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.

Honorable Mention:DCPUToolChain – an assembler, compiler, emulator and Integrated Development Environment for the DCPU-16 virtual CPU.

The list reflects the broader trends in modern programming, especially the growing need for mobile and cross-platform development.

Several of the projects deal with extending or enhancing JavaScript. JavaScript was originally as a simple scripting language for the Netscape browser. Now developers are building much larger applications that run both in the browser and on the server using JavaScript, and relying on it to build mobile applications.

For example, Yahoo Mojito is part of a growing family of JavaScript frameworks that help developers to build complex, desktop-like applications. AJAX-heavy web applications like Google Docs have changed user expectations for responsiveness and interactivity on the web. With frameworks like Mojito, Meteor, Derby and Flatiron, developers can create code that runs in both the browser and on the server using the Node.js platform.

Microsoft's TypeScript was released last October and is a JavaScript-like language that is translated into JavaScript before being run. It adds a few additional features, such as static typing, that are helpful for developers trying to build larger applications. Its goals are similar to Google's Dart programming language, but is much less of a departure from JavaScript.

Getting outside the tech community bubble, InaSAFE is a project backed by the Indonesian Disaster Management Agency, the Australia-Indonesia Facility for Disaster Reduction and the World Bank. It's a plugin for the open source GIS application Quantum GIS designed to help prepare for the impacts of floods, earthquakes, or tsunami. It crunches data from several sources, including scientists and local governments to model flooding and other scenarios, allowing governments and NGOs to make evacuation plans and other preparations.

Not all of the winners had big organizations behind them. Syte was created by developer/designer/entrepreneur Rodrigo Neri to fill a gap he saw in site building applications. "I know a lot of people that should have a personal web site but they don't," he wrote on his own Syte-based blog. "Some of them are developers and some are designers, both that should be capable of putting one together but they don't."

There are already thousands of ways to build a website, open source or otherwise, yet Syte was successful by filling a gap that was still open. "I think what made Syte take off was the ability to integrate with most of your social networks which was a concept only a few were doing at the time," Neri says. The platform allows users to use existing tools, such as Tumblr or WordPress.com to manage a blog, but brings everything together in a central location, much like the hosted service About.me.

Neri also has some thoughts on how other new open source projects can succeed. "I feel that building good documentation on how to utilize an open source project is the key for a project success," he says. "You want to make sure that when people go download your project they can quickly recreate it for their needs."